Especially because he could have bought it for so much less.

very ironic to create an entire community about the person you hate.

I truly think this is all his fucking up, nothing else. He was trying to take away features that probably align with the people who gave him money, but had no idea how to make it work and make money and is desperate. Desperation makes you even more stupid.

Because he’s doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn’t it obvious?

It is tremendously obvious, I agree. At one point it felt kinda hyperbolic to say, but not for awhile now.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to speculate what's in it for him, but it's 100% obvious that's what's being done.

I keep thinking there must be some high level plan here to destroy twitter for the good of humanity. I mean it’s that or Elon actually just is that stupid. At this point the latter seems the most likely …

That was my original thought when he came on and immediately fired 75% of the staff. It's not some savvy slimming down or cost-cutting. It was more like a wrecking ball.

It was fairly clear that his overall desire was the make the platform less useful for liberals and more for conservatives. It seems like he is content to destroy it if he can't achieve the latter.

No, you don’t throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles, not even if you are as rich as Musk. Musk is (probably) a narcissist who thought he could make it work in his delusional mind.

He wanted a mouthpiece for the MAGA crowd, and he probably thought the desire in the population for it, would make it succeed, if he made the platform embrace that. He probably envisioned himself as a great liberator, who would be celebrated for bringing free speech back to America.

Musk has been losing it for a long time, and it seems to only get worse.

That’s like saying “my car may fail after I poured sand into the gas tank and replaced the electrical with speaker wires”

I think that’s obvious to everyone. But, if you’re claiming he’s doing it on purpose… That’s just some next level batshit conspiracy theory.

I don’t know. The way it’s going down, it really makes him look like an idiot. He could have just flipped the switch and turned it off as a massive demonstration of power.

Instead he’s making one mindboggingly stupid decision after another, showing the whole world how utterly incompetent he is.

The most logical explanation for me is the easiest one: if he’s making stupid and incompetent decisions, maybe he’s just stupid and incompetent.

People told me I was crazy when I said he bought it to shut it down. Look who he hangs out with, people with a fuckton of money who hate free speech. Very powerful people who control media empires and run oppressive regimes.

He might be stupid, but the people pulling his strings aren’t.

Like others have said, bullshit. He’ll drive it into the ground and pretend that was his plan the whole time, like he’s some undercover genius three steps ahead of everyone, when really he’s just constantly playing catch-up with his narcissistic outbursts.

Make it a hook up site, might as well. He can do financial transactions like he wanted to.

Honestly, might’ve been better off trying to turn a porn site into an everything app. The internet was built on porn after all.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

I wonder this a bit as folks flock to Bluesky. I mean, Threads is just right out there, but Facebook always has been so that demographic was going to be there anyhow. The people flocking to Bluesky because they don't like Musk had better hope Jack Dorsey doesn't turn out to be nuts now, right?

I feel like this whole debacle should have pumped up the various bits of the Fediverse more than it has.

I like the most recent The Verge variant: Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called…

I call it Xitter. The X is pronounced with an “sh” sound.

Better to just call it “The site formerly known as Twitter” and don’t mention X at all. That would piss him off more.

I saw someone on Mastodon say something along the lines of "I'll continue to deadname Twitter for as long as Musk continues to deadname his daughter" and I love that sentiment.

Seems like it will be the website formerly known as existing soon enough.

I just call it Twitter. Just like I call the (former?) rapper Kanye West. I don’t cater to the whims of the 1% if I can help it.

It also wasn’t really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.

I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he’s been talked out of.

It isn't failing, Musk is failing.

But he’s a rocket scientist and a computer scientist!! (\s he’s neither)

Most of the value was probably with the brand itself. Which he then tossed away. Genius.

It’s true. This man has no dick.

How did all of these people replying to you never see Ghostbusters? It’s criminal.

This take is exhausting. It’s like the political version of narcissism: here’s how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!

If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk’s friend’s companies or governments?

You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?

Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actual autocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.

In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they’re organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn’t do it because they saw somebody’s sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the “Like” button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we’ll all be better off with it gone.

EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he’s done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.

For real!? I cannot think of a worse cancer than twitter/X and the horrific abomination that it is cannot whither away quickly enough.

What possible benefit has Twitter ever offered mankind?

That is the result, but Elon is too much of a prideful idiot to do it intentionally. But it’s entirely possible some of the others involved were aiming for that.

It was the circus, not “our global town square”.

Or let it die for the lulz

Not many people are going to sign up to do their financial transactions through a social media site run by a narcissistic dipshit. And that is his ultimate goal with this x everything app nonsense. Zero chance it becomes, as he predicted, the biggest financial institution in the world.

All he had to do to make twitter work was… nothing.

I’m sorry - as someone who has done some work with disaster response, this was one of my main concerns. When they threatened to take away NWS access to API without huge fees, I was honestly horrified. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but a lot of what my organization did was scour Twitter for official information and also personal accounts of folks who needed help/the conditions on the ground.

It is honestly a travesty that a resource such as this can be reduced to literal 💩 when people need it the most. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I hope more and more folks/orgs migrate to a suitable alternative(s) sooner rather than later, but the damage has been done. There’s always a percentage who never do, and you can’t fix that.

Governments should either be operating their own systems for this or, hell I don’t know, why not just spin up a their ready-to-go Mastodon instance or something else in the fediverse not subject to the delirious whims of a petulant muskrat born with daddy’s money?

Cry harder

Do you know what website you’re on?

I’d say that’s stupid, but so is every other idea he comes up with for it so who knows.

There’s no reason to speculate his motives. It’s obvious he didn’t want to buy Twitter when he was forced by courts to buy it. He was being an idiot trying to manipulate the stock price. I know it’s hard to believe a multi-billionaire can be an idiot, but it happened. There’s no 4d chess move. Rich people are fallible as everyone else.

Would that have been worth $44b?

Big parts of the youth did not use twitter. Twitter had at its peak about 500mio active users. Instagram has 2.4 billion, tiktok 1 billion, snapchat 750mio. The relevancy of twitter is highly skewed, because the media used it a lot.

I need some other stuff to follow on mastadon. I mostly used twitter for writers and bands. And Gritty. Now I’m looking for stuff to follow on mastadon and coming up short.

The horrific opportunity cost inherent to having a billionaire class.

The nice thing about our economic system is that value is rarely completely destroyed, the money he paid for Twitter didn’t cease to exist, it went to former Twitter shareholders.

They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.

The money isn’t gone, it’s just changed hands

millions of wasted hours of effort. For nothing.

aah, Social Media in a nutshell.

Definitely prefer the vanity projects of the past. Libraries, city halls etc

Hyperloop, boring tunnels, sending cars to space, etc

Stop me when you’ve heard enough to believe this guy has obvious disdain for all of us.

So you’ve got experience with Tesla’s autopilot function…

If there’s anything left to buy aside from tacky merch shirts. I’m sure the creditors will pick it clean and auction off the best bits to the highest bidder.

Maybe, or maybe it’ll be another Bebo level disaster.

Can’t someone else just make Twitter now tho?

Bingo.

And since won’t get back all the staff he dismissed; they’re going to have to just slap the Twitter brand on a Mastodon instance.

How did he ruin it though? I hear that all the time but I myself haven’t noticed any changes. Well, except for a logo but that’s very minor

Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.

If we make Facebook to go to place to talk about Elon he’ll do it out of spite and narcissism.

So the conspiracy is that Musk paid like 20+B and the Saudis paid another ~10B just to keep Trump out of prison?

They already got Trump’s DMs from twitter. Twitter actually fought it and had to pay a $350,000 fine for not turning the DMs over immediately. I think that Musk doesn’t like his fellow right wing cultists from being blocked/ignored by regular people and liberals. Hence his recent comment that he was going to remove the ability to block anyone on X. Of course lots of people immediately said that they’d leave because angry right wing stalkers doxxing them and such.

I mean, Elon sucks, but I am kind of happy to hear Twitter might fully die. I’ve always hated the idea of forced character limits.

The world needs more critical and expansive discussion, not additional reasons to summerize and minimize important topics into long headlines.

Don’t forget Twitter was already in big problems operating at a loss in a lot of its existing years. It’s definitely plummeting even further with his decisions though.

Weed out all the bots at the same time by demanding fotoID

Fuck that, you’ll also exclude most EU countries since that’s an overreach of privacy.

If it kills Twitter and Meta get a hit at the same time, it’s only a win.

If it fails Meta will likely have to be broken up, their monopoly on social media is outrageous these days.

As if it doesn’t deserve it already, regardless?

Weed out all the bots at the same time

They don’t want to do that. That would destroy a significant chunk of their userbase and make X look weaker.

What’s the point of copying TikTok? Given Elongs record, it would be done haphazardly and badly. But even if they pull it off, the audience won’t switch over. Or else they’d come back to instagram when they added TikTok features.

It’s perhaps stupider than that. The guy couldn’t take getting made fun of on Twitter, so he bought and killed it.

This is a really lazy take. The elite have forever wanted to control the common people through the manipulation of laws, economy, news,etc. That’s why the Saudis put up the majority of the loan to enable Elon to buy it…so they could gain control over public dissent and white wash their abhorrent public image.

Meanwhile, Elon’s a glorified troll with a god complex, who wants to build his own clubhouse for more extreme right wing content.

touch grass

That would imply him possessing ability to think that far ahead.

I don’t get this take - because if this was the plan, why not just shut Twitter down straight away instead of whatever is going on right now?

The actions of the platform don’t indicate they’re trying to kill it, just that they have really bad ideas trying to make money off it.

What would be the objective here though? It just scatters users to other platforms. I don’t really understand why anyone would want that ?

Read in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

Of all his managerial feats, I’m confident that one is beyond him.

Wishful thinking

Yes hello I am Normal Citizen. Where do we go for the money?

I always thought that the name was changed to something way more unappealing and doesn’t have anywhere near the same ring to it as “Twitter”. It’s kind of cringe imo. Like he was trying to make it seem like this was something so groundbreaking and new that it was deserving of one letter, “X”. I’m not surprised it’s going to flop.

His projects, perhaps. Most likely not. He himself will never face consequences for any of the problems he has caused. Law doesn’t exist for the rich. You can stall, bribe, move to a different country, buy immunity, buy witnesses. Do whatever you want and can to make the problem go away… and it will go away. Even if he does get convicted of anything punishment will be stern look and “now be good, okay?”…

Who can move Daddy’s money around. He never would’ve had a shot coming from blue collar origins.

What changed is that unchecked power and increasing public presence have caused his behaviour to become increasingly erratic, exposing him for the charlatan he is.

Yeah. Couldn’t be the fact that he went full mask off, showing how ignorant and delusional he is.

There were many factors that changed people’s opinions of him, and for me it has absolutely nothing to do with “the media.”

Remember when he randomly called a guy a pedophile on Twitter who saved the kids in the cave rescue, all because they didn’t use his submarine idea?

That was the turning point for me 5 years ago, and he’s gone downhill ever since. The reason he was the golden child of tech for many left leaning individuals is because he was pushing forward electric vehicles in a manner no one else had the will to.

He also happens to be a piece of shit as a human being… Nothing to do with “the media.”